Hot electrons can be created when a high-energy photon of electromagnetic radiation (such as light) strikes a semiconductor.
Because of the high effective temperatures, hot electrons are very mobile, and likely to leave the semiconductor and travel into other surrounding materials.
For instance, some solar cells rely on the photovoltaic properties of semiconductors to convert light to electricity.
In such cells, the hot electron effect is the reason that a portion of the light energy is lost to heat rather than converted to electricity.
[6] The simplest predicts an electron-phonon (e-p) interaction based on a clean three-dimensional free-electron model.
In a MOSFET, when a gate is positive, and the switch is on, the device is designed with the intent that electrons will flow laterally through the conductive channel, from the source to the drain.
Hot electrons may jump from the channel region or from the drain, for instance, and enter the gate or the substrate.
A high substrate current means a large number of created electron-hole pairs and thus an efficient Si-H bond breakage mechanism.
Advances in semiconductor manufacturing techniques and ever increasing demand for faster and more complex integrated circuits (ICs) have driven the associated Metal–Oxide–Semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) to scale to smaller dimensions.
The presence of such mobile carriers in the oxides triggers numerous physical damage processes that can drastically change the device characteristics over prolonged periods.
Hot carrier degradation is fundamentally the same as the ionization radiation effect known as the total dose damage to semiconductors, as experienced in space systems due to solar proton, electron, X-ray and gamma ray exposure.